Chinese President Hu Jintao on Saturday offered Zambia a multimillion dollar investment package aimed at boosting ties. Facing mounting accusations of Chinese exploitation of African labor and resources _ an issue during last year’s Zambian presidential elections Hu Jintao stressed that Beijing was motivated by partnership rather than purely profit.
“China is happy to have Zambia as a good friend, good partner and a good brother,” Hu Jintao said at a joint news conference with President Levy Mwanawasa.
Speaking through an interpreter, Hu Jintao said that China’s relationship with Zambia “represents a new type of strategic partnership” in Africa.
The two-day visit to Zambia is Hu Jintao’s fourth stop on an eight-nation African tour intended to boost Chinese investment in _ and returns from _ the resource-rich but desperately poor continent.
A banner at Lusaka airport greeted the Chinese president as “our all-weather friend.”
But while many Zambians welcome the Chinese presence, there also has been a backlash, fueled by workplace accidents, concerns over poor working conditions and low pay at Chinese-run copper mines, and resentment over an influx of Chinese traders into the apparel industry.
China’s involvement in Zambia, which was the first country to recognize China’s Communist government, dates back to the early 1970s, when China built a railway linking central Zambia to the nearest port city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Since the late 1990s, Chinese investments in the southern African nation have soared and now total $500 million _ the third largest after those of South Africa and former colonial master Britain.
China has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Zambia’s copper sector, which accounts for 60 percent of the country’s exports.
The influx of cheap Chinese goods, as elsewhere in the world, triggered political debate in Zambia’s September elections. Opposition challenger Michael Sata won support in urban areas after criticizing what he called “exploitive” Chinese investors.
“They’re not here to develop Zambia, they’re here to develop China,” said Guy Scott, a Sata ally who represents Lusaka’s central district in parliament.
